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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> BLM workshop

I live in Eastern-European, one ocean away from the States, I'm curious about these workshops, do they really happen as often as people say they happen? (let's say once a month or so, which I would consider "often" for this type of meetings).

I'm asking because they do look to me like pretty much resembling the communist party indoctrinations work-place meetings my dad had to attend in the 1980s (my dad's workplace was in the business of building stuff inside a steel mill factory, so nothing intrinsically political about it), those communist party meetings seemed to be taken seriously by absolutely no-one and were seen just as a huge loss of one's time.

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They're happening in the UK too, however at least for my employer, it's a one-off multi-hour 'training session'. Amusingy, our trainers were 3 white people, led by a male.

The book 'White Fragility' was used as a reference. You just sit through it and at the end say you found it enlighening or whatever. Box ticked.

> Box ticked

Sorry, job quit.

I would NEVER allow myself to be forced into a room to listen to some racist “anti racist” nonsense and then consent to agreement on any of it even implicitly.

I’d consider that only a small step above willingly kneeling before my executioner.

I'm from the UK, in my experience it's only once per person per workplace and takes a few hours.

They're often called Marxists.

I've not grown up in eastern Europe, but yeah probably right. Everyone thinks it's bullshit waste of time, but will anyone speak up? No, you sit through because it's easier than dealing with the consequences of denouncing the indoctrination.

They call themselves Marxists, but Marx didn't care about diversity, or think white people are evil, or that there's toxic masculinity, and would deride these ideas. They are not marxists.

they pretty much are

if the yardstick is Marx and his manifesto + Das Kapital series, then practically nobody was a Marxist - not even Marx himself later in life and certainly not Lenin, Stalin or Mao

since Gramsci the mainstream of Marxism replaces material determinism with a hybrid of cultural hegemony and social gatekeeping, with things like religion, race, feminism being much more central than they were for Marx - and this has been the mainstream of Marxism for 100+ years, so hardly a new development in this particular respect

Not really. HN skews pretty right wing on things like this. It isn't nearly as commonplace or ridiculous as it would have you believe. I say this as a member of a "woke MegaCorp."

> HN skews pretty right wing on things like this.

Homie, that’s just an indication of how far left you are.

HN doesn’t “skew pretty right” on anything. That’s just perspective for you.

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